Psychonauts 2 plays and feels like a Playstation 2 game. I get that most people use that as a term of derision but I mean it as a compliment. The Playstation 2 has some of my favorite games and was a time when video games were reinventing what they could be. See Killer7, Shadow of the Colossus, Metal Gear Solid 3, and of course the original Psychonauts. Psychonauts 2 is incredibly creative, charming, and at times even emotional. This isn’t being said just because I’m a fan of the original as well. The original Psychonauts came out in 2005 for PS2, Xbox, and PC and was made by the then newly formed Double Fine. Double Fine has made plenty of games in the sixteen year gap with none I was interested in and plenty that didn’t review too well. The only exception to the aforementioned statement is the Psychonauts VR game which I hated. Funnily, the VR game was the only one in the series that was funded well enough and didn’t go through delays and cancellations. Needless to say, from the gap in time and track history, I had low expectations for Psychonauts 2. The best-case scenario, in my mind, was that the game would have some of the token snarks you’d expect, no level would be better than the best from the first and we’d all call it a night. And while it is technically that, it is also much more.
The story is that you are circus runaway and gifted psychic, Razputin Aquato. Three days after the events of the first game, you are brought to Psychonauts HQ to investigate who kidnapped the head of the organization, who was saved during the VR game. It is quickly realized that the abductor was working for someone trying to bring back a deadly psychic. Said deadly psychic was an adversary of the founding Psychonauts, the Psychic Six, causing Raz to embark on a mission to reunite the team to battle this nemesis. To do this you’ll have to enter the minds of nearly all the founding members and complete platforming challenges and collect-a-thons in order to get them over a shared trauma concerning their final battle together. It’s in this area where Psychonauts genuinely surprised me.
The original game’s cast of brains to enter and screw around with were not connected with each other in any meaningful way, nor did the depictions of mental health come off as particularly realistic. Not to say it was offensive or anything close to that, but the famous Milkman Conspiracy level from the first game is a gag about how insane and paranoid Boyd Cooper was. By having the founding Psychonauts’ issues come from a shared experience and life together, each brain not only gives us insight into the owner but also on plenty of the other members. Additionally, issues like abandonment, alcoholism, identity, and loss are played as being serious and written well enough where it works. Don’t get me wrong, the game is still filled with wacky humor, but rarely is the mental illness itself the joke.
I smiled a ton at the silly gags and Compton’s Cookoff will be a favorite level of mine because of how goofy the anthropomorphic food begging to be used in a cooking competition is. Yet, Bob’s bottles or Strike City had moments that made me genuinely feel sad and contemplative about the themes the game was going for. A number of characters deal with the loss of their friends or significant others alone and that’s important. When the founders reunite it’s a great scene because they’re choosing to be together again and to push through their hardships as a team. Their biggest mental issues become worse when they’re separate and dealing with their grief alone. And the writing caries these themes and relationships. The characters are cartoonish and oftentimes goofy but the game knows when to make their actions and dialogue grounded in reality. Psychonauts 2 is also concerned about acknowledging everyone’s humanity. Even the game’s big bad can be redeemed, so long as they want to atone for their misdeeds. The game most certainly isn’t actually about just fighting the antagonist but saving them. In that way, among others, Psychonauts 2 is about compassion towards others.
This is what I want out of video games as a medium and art in general. Psychonauts 2 has a maturity that developed from the sixteen years between installments. It was initially a masterpiece simply by being a goofy PS2 game. But art should evolve with the times as well as an artist’s maturity. I certainly appreciate it more as someone who played Psychonauts 1 for the first time in middle school and its sequel during the second half of college. While yes, it is true that Psychonauts isn’t as funny as its predecessor nor are any levels as good as the top 3 in the original, that doesn’t really matter. Psychonauts 2 is still fun but more importantly, it uses the medium to tell a character-driven story that moves the player. And some people have written the game off because it chooses to be more mature. There are even two married gay characters if you want to write a steam review about how the SJWs ruined your game. But, don’t we want our art to evolve in more adult directions while avoiding ever being considered edgy or gritty? To make us feel human and then to make bigger points about the human experience? I certainly think so.
The gameplay also rocks but it’s clear that’s where the game has the most issues. At its core, the game is your typical 3D platformer. You jump and use abilities to traverse to different areas based upon the mind of whoever you stuck a tiny door to. The abilities all around are fun to use from the PSI-Blast which is just a standard range attack, to mental projection which creates a mini Raz. The abilities are also widely useful in combat against the game’s expanding enemies list. From the first game are censors which stamp out things that aren’t supposed to be in someone’s head but there are also regrets, bad moods, panic attacks, doubts, enablers, judgments, and bad ideas. Throughout the game, you can unlock pins to enhance your attacks, abilities, or just do something superfluous like give Raz a little dancing idle animation. The problem is the game is a bit clunky in combat and sometimes it can feel like there are too many enemies with different weaknesses at once. So you’ll want to use the pins, but you only get three slots and if you’re like me, two of them will be for cosmetic changes or haha funnies. Likewise, you have four ability slots to map eight abilities in total to, but you’ll probably always have levitation and PSI-blast locked to two. These are easily fixable problems but they are problems nonetheless.
Like any 3D platformer, there are also tons of collectibles. There are figments, half-a-mind, nuggets of wisdom, emotional baggage, and memory vaults. Almost all are pretty easy to keep track of and collecting them is both easy and levels you up. So there is an incentive to collect. The exception is figments. While they do level you up and each figment is a new 2D drawing that means something to the person and the world in their mind, they are plentiful. Some levels have well over a hundred and there’s no good way to keep track of which ones you collected in which area, so 100%-ing it is a son of a bitch. Again, that could be fixed in an update, and if you’re not a completionist then you probably won’t worry. I do love how figments and memory vaults give you interesting lore about the world and its characters though.
The levels themselves are a treat. I constantly felt like I was being surprised with concepts and themes for levels. Each one was a blast to explore and I’m hard-pressed to think of any level I disliked. Now thinking about it, Psychonauts 2 doesn’t have as high highs with out there level design as the first one but it doesn’t have the lowest lows either. The one everyone will remember is the PSI-King level which is cell-shaded and meant to look like a crazy acid trip. The hospital cross casino level is also really inventive. This is all without mentioning the overworld which has some great design with insane detail. There are caves that could have just been caves but are instead filled with eye candy to give the area a distinct feeling even though you’ll probably blaze through it. The game is filled with visual detail and story telling. Like the tiny signs held by the clumps of hair in Ford's Follicles.
Final Thoughts: Psychonauts 2 wasn’t really what I was expecting, but it surprised me in all the right ways and I ended up falling in love with it. It is what video games should be. Equal parts creative, emotional, funny, and just a fun game to play. Psychonauts 2 is also a really pretty game. Many worlds have great-level design and are a joy to look at. There are problems, yes, but they’re so minor and fixable that I can’t think of them as anything but minor blemishes to an otherwise exemplary video game. I wish bigger budget games could take risks like this and put their energy into being both fun and deeply meaningful again, and it’s the best 3D platformer since Mario Odyssey. It has surpassed the original in my mind and is one of my favorite games of all time. Maybe I’ll even play it again or 100% it soon enough.
5/5
Oh this shit rules
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